As you gain experience as a STEM teacher, your plans for your students grow in complexity and depth. You see amazing ideas on Instagram that will push your students in new ways and you spend hours creating Pinterest-worthy challenge set-ups. But, sometimes, that drive to find new and better activities causes you to overlook something else that is essential for your students to grow as Makers – free-form opportunities to create without a teacher-imposed agenda. Sometimes the simplest plan can be the best plan for growing your students’ skills – Free Build is a quintessential example of a meaningful, student-directed learning activity.
If you’re like me when I first started out as a STEM teacher, you leave Free Build as an emergency sub plan, when you don’t have time to whip up something snazzier. Too often in teaching, we measure an activity’s potential benefit to our students by the amount of effort it takes us to prepare it. But, Free Build is one low-prep activity where you can reap huge dividends in student learning.
Here are four reasons why you should consider making Free Build a regular part of your STEM curriculum.
1. Free Build empowers students with creative freedom.
STEM challenges frequently provide students with opportunities to make choices about the materials they will use, how they will use them, and whether or not to collaborate to accomplish the design goals. Even at their most open-ended, though, STEM challenges do not typically allow students to make choices about the task or goals for their creations.
In contrast, Free Build gives students latitude in choosing what they will make, which is the ultimate creative freedom. Allowing students to engage in Free Build empowers them to set their own goals and gives them a chance to navigate the process of adjusting expectations or imagining richer possibilities as their build progresses. If we want to cultivate students as Makers who can think creatively and perhaps one day invent something to fill an unmet need or solve an urgent problem, we must provide them with space and opportunity to create without a teacher-imposed agenda.
Left: A group of students combines marble track pieces, Tinker Toys, and Keva planks to create a water park.
2. Free Build sparks incidental discoveries that enhance later builds.
When students engage in Free Build, they are more likely to take creative risks. If there isn’t an extrinsic goal for what they need to create, failure becomes less public and loses some of its emotional resonance, reducing the need for students to “play it safe” with their designs. As a result, students tinker more deeply with the offered materials and discover more of their possible affordances. The Free Build process epitomizes N.V. Scarfe’s idea that “Play is the highest form of research,” as students are conducting inquiries to learn what a material can do and how it can be combined with other materials.
For this reason, I also frequently employ Free Build as a tool for allowing students to experiment with materials that we’ll be using for an upcoming project. Before introducing the challenge prompt, I will give students time (often a whole class period) to play with the materials that will later be on offer. Their resulting projects are often much richer because they are able to leverage what they learn from their incidental discoveries during Free Build time.
3. Free Build catalyzes spontaneous and authentic collaboration.
I spend a lot of time and energy trying to set students up for success when they’re working in groups. Learning how to be an effective collaborator requires ample opportunities to practice and lots of coaching and feedback. While assigned groupwork can often feel forced or lead to student resistance, students often actively seek out opportunities to authentically collaborate during Free Build time. What starts out as a solo build often becomes a pair or group endeavor as peers find something interesting and start asking questions or sharing ideas about it. Groups naturally seem to organize themselves around a shared interest or exploration of a particular material, forming or reforming as needs and projects evolve over time. Even my students who vehemently assert preferences to work alone often end up working alongside someone else during Free Build time.
Moreover, when the goal for a creation is student-led, it puts kids in charge of grappling with how to best divide up the work and how to incorporate everyone’s thinking – essential skills for effective collaboration. Because they’re kids, there are, of course, still times when I need to intervene or provide coaching to these self-formed groups, but I’ve found that my students more effectively resolve interpersonal disputes in these more open-ended building sessions.
4. Free Build provides insight into student interests and thought processes.
I try to enter each Free Build session equipped with a full tank of curiosity. Getting an opportunity to see what students choose to create is an excellent way to discover student interests that I can then draw on in future interactions. During Free Build time, I circulate around the room and spend time asking each student what they are making. Their explanations always surprise me – there is so much depth and complexity behind their creations that I would never glean just from looking at them. When they explain their work to me, I also gain insight into how each Maker approaches the process of creating something – what considerations they make, how (or if) they break a larger goal up into steps, and how (or whether) they adjust their approach when something isn’t working out as they hoped. Often, I’ll also be able to notice patterns or consistent struggles across the room and develop mini-lessons that can help to push everyone’s Maker skills forward.
If you’re hesitant to try out Free Build because you feel like you don’t have the time, consider that the amount of learning you can do about your students during a Free Build session can help immensely in planning future activities to maximize engagement and let you figure out what specific skills your students may need to practice to move their creations to the next level.
So there you have it, four reasons to consider adding Free Build into your STEM activities. By the way, I’m not just talking about younger students here – I believe that all students can benefit from the opportunity to choose their own goals for creating. I frequently use elements of Free Build with even my middle-school students, by giving them class time to examine new or unfamiliar materials or tools before we’ll be making use of them in projects.
One final point: Free Build doesn’t mean Free For All! I put a frame around our Free Build classes that helps to provide a structure for success. I’ll talk more about that in my next post, so stay tuned.